*Journal

RARE REAL LIFE UPDATE: been busy working on a roof. It’s really hot outside. Speaking of HOT…

Development Plan

The ultimate goal is for you to have a finished game. Playable, polished, the whole shebang. To that end, everything else has taken a backseat, such as releasing more unfinished versions.

Currently we are updating the graphics and code to support a high resolution. We’ll post a new version once that’s done and notify everyone who has bought a copy.

Next will be working in the main game, which is mostly story and has already been written: scenes, dialogue, and all. We’ll try to post new versions once we get chapters in place (no emails though, don’t want to spam). But, fair warning: there won’t be any polish or ‘finality’ to it. It’s a first pass; things will be adjusted, added, and removed.

Next will be a pass for balancing, polishing, all that extra jazz that makes a game feel complete and fully realized. Music and most of the sound will likely be added here, along with most of the fullscreen ‘intimate moments’.

Lastly one last pass to make sure everything is as it should be. Will finalize the title screen menus and casual mode. An email to everyone to let them know it’s more or less finished. Fix up the website (long overdue.) And maybe some ‘bonus’ stuff after that. maybe.

So don’t worry! Too deep to get out now~

The funny thing about this kind of talk is who cares once it’s finished. Really is the goal.

***About Forum Registration***
We’re aware of issues with registering and apologize about any inconvenience. We’ve been hit pretty hard by spammers and have had to put in some rough measures that seem to prevent real honest people from registering. Will let you know once we have a handle on it, but it’s taking a backseat to getting the next HoT update finished, sorry :(

Comparison of the New vs Old menu design and size in House of Tail

The game is in an unplayable state at present due to the change in base resolution. Once we get that fixed, we would like to get back on a regular series of updates like when it was first released, except here the updates will have new content instead of bug fixes only.

I think we are finally through the holiday season. It seemed like this year it was a time for family, friends, travel to see family, travel to funerals for family, travel to visit friends. Feels like we’ve all spent the past few months sitting in a car. It is nice to take time and visit those close to you, but it’s also nice to be back making ‘special games’ :3

Update Time!

What we’re working on:

– Adding in 2d animations (early example shown.)

For full-scene images, we’re not sure how crazy interactive (or if at all) we want to go. It’s on our minds cause it’s like “why not?” but our priority is the main-game interactivity. One could work on the same project forever if they’re not careful… best to finish!

The original method of drawing outlines by pixel looks neat, but took forever and clashed with the shading as they’re two different styles. It was also hard to appreciate the pixel lines as we shrunk the images anyway, ha……

– Increase to 720 resolution, 60 frames a second.

Originally we chose the 540 vertical resolution with the web-browser platform in mind. Since then we’ve decided to drop support for it (for the time-being, might come back when the game’s finished.) Thus allowing us not to worry with its limitations. Currently the download version is at 60fps but a lot of the movement is mapped to 30fps–tweaking that as well.

– Built-in update checker and plans to update more often as we go. It sure has been a while since the last one, sorry about that ^^;

We’re finishing up writing House of Tail’s story. It’s… pretty long. Let’s not take this long again, okay? Okay!

The next character preview will contain the ‘main 4’ and I’ll post it once we’re happy with the main character’s costume. It’s been tricky, as we’ve been ‘cheating’ a lot by not even bothering with costumes for most characters.

Can sort it, filter results by gender, completion, a host of things. Can click the images to show/hide info. It moves around like some fancy iPhone app. Can’t wait to show you.

What remains is to go through each game and fill out the details. The tags will be very fluid and up-for-change, and I’m sure we might miss some, or could better word it. Looking forward to your input when it goes live~

Jacquelyn – Former soldier who ended her career early to work at the town’s pub. She’s had enough of the adventurer’s life. Unless, perchance something were to happen that might convince her to team up with you one last time.

Nabie – Why am I showing you her?! It’s a secret! Forget she’s here. She doesn’t even live in the kingdom. They’d probably mistake her for a monster.

Salvine – Works at the library and hospital, and is the town’s local healer. He’s in a relationship with Basio, and Wiseluck despises him for it. Wouldn’t it be funny if Wise needed his help and had to recruit him? Cause he just might.

Basio – Trains your characters at the gym. Is up for adventure if asked.

What does it all mean? We’re crazy, for starters. And we’re working in some variety to the game’s setup. It will be an adventure, for sure. Has been one already in making it~ ha ha… ha ._.

Here we have the prince and the princess, rulers of Branchland. Sort of. It’s slightly complicated. You see, there was a war their kingdom lost and their parents died in it. Don’t feel too bad, it all happened before they could even walk.

And what would royalty be without some servants to do their bidding? Bartleman is the personal guard of the prince, who seems to need it more than the princess. The royal wizard Wiseluck acts as the princess’s advisor, who handles the affairs of the crown more than her younger brother.

Wiseluck is also your starting boss. And he gets his own chapter later on. You even get to help him with the mess that is his personal love life.

Future Updates Plan

The story is in draft mode, meaning we’re making sure it all fits together and nothing stands out as ‘out of nowhere’ or breaks the tone/narrative. Because of this, the beginning will likely receive the most changes and reworks to line up with all the plot points later on.

Even so, we know you’ve been waiting for another update and we’d like to try to give you the tutorial and first chapter next. After that, it would hopefully be the entire story mode, complete with actual sound and music. Then comes a finished casual mode and extras, like an image gallery. And somewhere in there a chance to commission your own characters into the game.

Whew. Typing all of that makes it seem like a long ways away, but we’re definitely getting there. This is going to happen!! No brakes on the game making train~

Busy busy busy

House of Tail

Our focus has been implementing the story mode. There are a lot of characters and scenes, much more than Common Grounds.

Sometimes it feels like this is going way overboard, but it should make for a much better experience and elevate the genre into something more than naughty pictures. We can only hope…

I’ve picked up some new coding tricks in the way of shaders, which should give the game that clean modern look that makes newer 2d games seem… well, modern. Because of this and time constraints, we’re not worrying with the online version of the game currently. We’d rather focus on making one good-looking version than juggling two. We might come back to it when things are finished. Was cool to see it was possible at least, right?

Game List

We’re working on a game list page for all those furry porn games mentioned in the forums. The code is in place, can filter/sort things, just need to put in the actual entries. Can already tell what tags to use will be tricky. And things like, should we put a date of release? Would be hard to gather that info.

We’d like to help promote and give these kind of games more attention. Maybe have some fun with silly reviews of them too. But our priority is to finish House of Tail.

Lack of Updates

We would love to update more. It’s just a tricky thing. We don’t plan to make HoT one of those games that gets all these updates where we work on it for the next ten years. We also do not want to bore you with all the silly things that don’t translate into good screenshots or don’t spoil the story.

All of that is lame excuses, I know. Next up, let’s begin introducing the main characters of HoT!!

Early story scene example(looks like Sebastion’s penis is doing the talking…)

We have the story fleshed out and are still slaving away putting it all in. Thought I’d take a break to show you some examples!

Above you can see cutscenes will be able to fit many characters, and they’re all skippable– (a lack of which always drives us nuts when playing games, we hope you appreciate this effort.) Ideally we’ll be able to work in some kind of backdrop behind the characters so you won’t see the game maps during them.

There will be choices

Something we wanted to improve upon from our last game was to include more cutscene choices. It’s tricky because we like to design our games where you make important choices in the core gameplay, but we can’t deny text choices are a lot of fun.